About RailsConf 2009

RailsConf Kudos | Who Should Attend | Program Committee

RailsConf, co-produced by Ruby Central, Inc. and O'Reilly Media, Inc., is the largest official conference dedicated to everything Rails. Through keynotes, sessions, tutorials, panels, and events, RailsConf is an interactive meeting ground for the most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies. The conference provides attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web and Rails to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.

RailsConf Kudos

"One of the main benefits I get from attending a conference is inspiration, and this was no exception. I'm extremely motivated to work on several projects now, and I can't wait to see everything else that was spurred on by the conference. Between that and all the great connections I was able to make, I'm happy to call Railsconf 2009 a huge success." —Ben Scofield, culann.com

"RailsConf 2009, Full of Awesome! RailsConf 2009 may be over, but the work continues back at home as people put into practice the tools and concepts they learned about last week." —Joshua Timberman, Opscode Blog

"Visiting RailsConf was a really great experience: lots of passionate and smart people doing interesting presentations, keynotes, sessions and tutorials and simply sharing ideas." —Eugene Toporov, JetBrains RubyMine Blog

"I had a really great time at RailsConf. I met a ton of really cool people bursting with enthusiasm for great projects...the diversity of things that people are doing with Rails far outstrips the ability of those most deeply involved in building it day-to-day to anticipate." —Yehuda Katz, member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project

"All told, we had a blast, and are looking forward to future RailsConfs!" —Jason LaPorte, Agora Games

RailsConf 2009 Features:

• Four entire days dedicated to Rails
• A program designed around all levels of expertise from novice to intermediate to advanced
• The most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies showcased onstage
• The opportunity to find solutions to the problems those in the trenches are facing
• A forum for a wide variety of business people seeking to collaborate and solve similar problems
• A gathering place for the worldwide Rails community, including an important network of experts, alpha geeks, and innovators
• Hands-on and in-depth guides for learning how to best employ Rails in a variety of situations
• Ample opportunities for all participants to connect, contribute, and collaborate throughout the event
• The chance to hear the latest updates, get information, and meet some of the the Rails core development team

Who Attends RailsConf?

• Rails and other web developers (independent, startup, enterprise/corporate)
• Other open source developers seeking to expand their skillset
• IT managers tracking emerging technologies
• Tech-savvy entrepreneurs with business ideas looking to implement web-based start-ups quickly in order to assess their ideas' potential for success
• Users at every level: new, intermediate, advanced, expert
• Others interested in web technologies and strategic implementation

RailsConf Program Committee

Program Chair

Chad Fowler
Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the world's largest corporations. He recently lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center. He is co-founder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby Conference, and is a leading contributor in the Ruby community. Chad is a contributor and editor for numerous books and is author of the recently released, "My Job Went to India (and all I got was this lousy book): 52 Ways to Save Your Job" and the forthcoming "Rails Recipes."

RailsConf Associate Chairs

David A. Black
David A. Black is a long-time Ruby and Rails programmer, author, and trainer. Active in the Ruby world since 2000, David is the author of "Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers" from Manning Publications. He has co-organized numerous Ruby/Rails conferences and spoken at conferences and Ruby/Rails users groups in the United States, Canada, and England. David is the chief author of Ruby's standard scanf library, and the author and maintainer of the official Ruby Change Request site.

Rich Kilmer
Rich Kilmer is the founder of Virginia-based software and services company InfoEther, Inc.. His background includes peer-to-peer software, wireless web, workflow, and pen computing. His current projects make production use of Ruby on several DARPA research projects. He is an active member of the Ruby development community working on Alph, FreeRIDE, RubyGems, RubyJDWP, Jabber4R, and hosts RubyForge.org.